Beyond Mr. Gonzales

Who really needs to 'lay out on the record' what led to the firings of U.S. attorneys

IN THE UPROAR over the firing of U.S. attorneys, most of the attention has been focused on Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, and it will be again later this week when he testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But it's increasingly clear that important questions about the firings must be directed to the White House, which inspired the plan, prodded it along and may well have selected at least one target more because of partisan politics than performance.

Certainly, there are useful avenues of inquiry with Mr. Gonzales, whose scheduled appearance today was postponed after the shootings at Virginia Tech. He will be challenged to reconcile his conflicting statements about his role; to balance competing desires to distance himself from the firings without coming across as an absentee manager; and to provide more facts than he did in his pre-released opening statement.

Specifically: How does Mr. Gonzales reconcile his assertion, in a USA Today op-ed on March 7, that the prosecutors were fired "for reasons related to policy, priorities and management -- what have been referred to broadly as 'performance-related' reasons" with the reported testimony by Michael A. Battle, who headed the office overseeing U.S. attorneys, that he was "not aware of performance problems with respect to several" of the prosecutors until just days before he called to seek their resignations?

How and why was New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias's name added to the hit list at the last minute? What was the nature of the attorney general's conversations on this topic with Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), White House aide Karl Rove and President Bush? Did Mr. Gonzales, as the Albuquerque Journal reported Sunday, tell Mr. Domenici that he would fire Mr. Iglesias only on the orders of the president?

The newspaper reported that the senator spoke to Mr. Rove and the president after the 2006 elections to demand Mr. Iglesias's ouster. Before the election, Mr. Domenici called and then hung up on the prosecutor when he said he would not be bringing a public corruption case involving a Democrat before Election Day. Did the White House tell Justice to fire Mr. Iglesias because he didn't produce a politically useful indictment in time? Because they didn't trust him to press election-fraud cases helpful to the GOP in the 2008 campaign?

The White House would like this to be a Justice problem, but it isn't turning out that way. "I mean, this took place inside the Justice Department," Vice President Cheney said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "The one who needs to answer to that and lay out on the record the specifics of what transpired is the attorney general, and he'll do so." But Mr. Cheney's rendition isn't accurate. The story unfolded inside the White House, too, and White House officials also need to "lay out on the record the specifics of what transpired."